Batson v. Kentucky

Batson v. Kentucky reversed the 1965 Swain ruling. (The case gained added impact because of the fact that perhaps only once a year does the High Court reverse its prior decisions.) Justice Powell delivered the opinion of the 7-2 majority vote. Justice White, who had written the 1965 decision, sided with the majority to overturn it. The Court ruled that peremptory challenges, in effect, deny a defendant the right to trial by jury of a cross-section of the community. This right is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which holds that citizens have the right to a trial by jury in the community where the crime allegedly took place.

More importantly, the Powell opinion declared that peremptory challenges were in violation of the first section of Fourteenth Amendment, also known as the Equal Protection Clause, which reads, in part:

. . . No State shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Thus, according to the Court, equal protection prohibited the selection of jury members based on their race. With Batson, the Court affirmed the principle it upheld in an 1880 decision that ruled it unfair to force a defendant to stand trial before a jury from which members of his race were purposefully excluded. Such exclusions, the Court said further, assumed that African Americans were incapable of making an impartial decision when considering the case of an African American defendant, as if they were not qualified to serve on a jury.